Marcia Chambers Photo
Four special ed paraprofessionals, abruptly fired from their elementary school jobs last June after their new union was formed, have their jobs back.
Back in July, Annie MacDonald ( far left in photo above), a field organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Local 222 of the Independent Labor and Police Union, which represents the paras, said: “There is no just cause here for these firings.” Click here to read a story about the firings.
Soon after, the union filed a series of legal complaints against the Branford Board of Education (BOE), asserting it engaged in anti-union conduct when it fired the special ed paras. All worked at the Mary T. Murphy Elementary School. One of the paras was a leader in the union’s formation last spring.
The union complaint was filed before the state’s Board of Labor Relations, a quasi-judicial agency that has the authority to resolve municipal and school labor disputes. MacDonald told the Eagle back then that before negotiations for their first contract could get started, the para firings needed to be addressed.
The municipal prohibitive practices complaint, as it is called, set in motion a legal process that included a pretrial arbitration hearing. It was at this juncture that a settlement effort got underway. In the end, the four employees were restored to their jobs, presumably with back pay and other benefits they lost.
Two of the paras returned to Murphy. One went to Mary R. Tisko Elementary School. A fourth is on medical leave.
MacDonald told the Eagle she could not elaborate on the rehirings “because of the agreements we made when we and they agreed to bring our four paras back to work,” she said.
The four paras had been told they lost their jobs because of anticipated “budgetary cuts.” However, on Aug. 1, nine new special ed job listings, including four at the elementary school level, were posted on the BOE website.
Last summer MacDonald said the four paras would be “perfectly able to fill any of those newly posted four positions.” Colleen Ezzo, another union field organizer, who is also part of the negotiating team, urged school officials to avoid legal expenses and restore the paras to their jobs.
Schools Superintendent Hamlet Hernandez urged them to apply for the posts. MacDonald said back then that she believed that union activity at the Murphy school was one reason for the firings. She also believed seniority was an issue.
In a prior interview, Anthony Buono, the principal of Mary Murphy, told the Eagle that seniority is not necessarily a factor in keeping a para in her job and that performance evaluations for paras have not occurred for the past three years. “There have not been any formal evaluations,” he confirmed. “That is accurate.”
The school district, now represented by Shipman & Goodman, the Hartford law firm Hernandez used when he was an assistant superintendent in Hamden, is at work on ground rules with the union that apparently include a confidentiality stipulation. That means the parties do not talk to the public or to the press while negotiations are underway.
“We are now working on the ground rules, “MacDonald said. “Beyond that there is not a whole lot I can say. We are going to the table at this point in time.” So far there has been one meeting.
Asked when she expects their first contract will be in hand, MacDonald said: “I have no idea.”
In all, the contract is expected to cover 139 employees. In the past MacDonald told the Eagle that she hoped negotiations with the school system would start in the fall of 2011 and that a contract would be in hand by June, 2012. But the fall term was devoted in part to restoring the jobs of the four paras who, it now turns out, were wrongly fired.
At the time of the layoffs, Hernandez took the position that because there was no collective bargaining agreement in place; the paras were at will employees and could be terminated based on the district’s needs.
“Nothing prevents them from filing a complaint,” Hernandez said. “I don’t think there is merit to the complaint. Anybody who knows labor law knows that if there is no collective bargaining agreement in place, there is no claim.”
But the union’s argument, that the paras were covered even without an actual agreement, prevailed. Three of the four paras were fired between the week the union won its election and the week the election was certified. The union argued once the election occurred all paras were covered by the union, even if it did not have a contract.
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I remember this story.
I believe that paras are very important to any logical effort to improve public education.
Somehow the notion that those at the top of the public ed hierarchy are more important than those at the bottom is flawed.
We need to approach ed reform from the bottom up and not from the top down.
And by this I mean resource allocation and not accountability.
As it stands now, the top gets the majority of salary budget dollars and none of the accountability, while the bottom gets a paltry amount of wages and all of the accountability.
This benefits only those at the top of the management hierarchy.
This must change for our kids to begin to thrive in public schools.